melodies of ocean blue
by lydiamaartin
Summary: When you leave behind childhood hopes of happily-ever-after, what is left for you to hold on to? - LucyJamesII - cousincest


**Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize. Also, yes, this is cousincest. If that makes you uncomfortable, don't read this.**

**Dedicated to multiple people: Kaye (what stars are) and Bri (swirling-summernotes), because of a mini-debate we had about cousincest couples and I said I might write a fic and convert them. Twinny (EllaBethh) for being awesome and loving LucyJames and giving me the prompts silk, sting, reflection, melodic, motion, and tender :) Blue (BlueEyes444) for also loving LucyJames and wanting me to post this.**

**Basically, I love all of you, and I hope you like this!  
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><p>It starts as an accident.<p>

-:-

She doesn't remember much from the first night. Just silken secrets whispered against her petal-glossed lips and tender kisses breathed down her throat and hands that promise velvet lies across the length of her body. Just his eyes, blue and desperate, a reflection of hers, and the moonlight stinging their backs through the open window. Just him, really, _James_ in all his broken, hopeless glory.

It was nothing but an accident, so she wakes up the next morning to find him already up, hair ruffled by her unsteady hands the night before and his bare back a heavy reminder of all that weighs on her heart, facing away from her towards the sunshine blooming in the sky. All his scars from Quidditch and schoolyard fights and hexes that never healed are scrawled across his back, tattooed into the fabric of _him_, memories of times gone by and all those days when she sat by him in a bed and wiped the blood from his body with her miracle-working hands.

Memories rush back, and then they are gone, leaving only her and him, Lucy and James, _LucyandJames_, together in a way they never can be.

"Go," he says. A suggestion, only, but one he knows she will follow. There's a reason she wasn't in Gryffindor like him.

She leaves.

-:-

She comes back, if only for answers.

And if she finds him sitting at his piano, shirtless again because she clearly needs more reminders of that sin-and-passion night, looking particularly dashing illuminated by rays of lavender and honey dusklight, well, it's just an accident, _really_.

It's all just an accident, after all.

"Lucy," he breathes the way he had that night, as if he were a dying man and she his lifeline, "you're back."

"I am," she agrees, taking a deep breath. "I wanted to know – "

"Why I kissed you?" he suggests wryly, finally turning to face her, and the shadows skating in the depths of his blue eyes (the same shade as hers, but she's trying not to think about that) startle her into a step backward, away from all the shadows in his (_her_) life, he who had always been the one person she could trust to light up her world with a sunny smile.

She's broken him, Lucy realizes with a raw certainty, achieved in one night what all those girls at Hogwarts never could. She's broken James Potter, armed only with the curtain of ice over her heart.

James stands, wobbly for a moment, and stalks forward. But while his strides in her direction are furious, pounding the same erratic tempo as her heartbeat, his eyes are gentle, so blue and so loving and _so_ lost, so gone, drifting away in dreams she could never hope to understand.

It's an accident, she tries to remember, (but it's _not_).

"Because after all these girls, Luce," James begins heatedly, "after all my pretty perfect lovers, I - " Here, his voice trails off into confusion.

"What?" Lucy demands, and here she's getting angry. "Did you suppose I could do what those girls couldn't? Because I'm your best friend - your cousin?"

And suddenly she's shaking, her whole body quivering like a long-forgotten leaf in the wind as the impact of what she's – he's – _they've_ done strikes her all at once, and suddenly, he's there, arms wrapped around her in the most innocent of hugs, a hug that jolts her back through time and into a past best forgotten, when they were young and innocent and free, happy and _together_.

When these hugs didn't mean what they do now.

"I should go," she murmurs, dashing at the tears that well up, and wrests her body out of his arms.

"You don't have to," he tries, but even he doesn't sound convinced. It's almost like he wants her to leave him again. Because there's nothing they can do for each other in this room with the piano and the notes that linger and the hearts that ache.

She leaves, again, and wonders if she'll ever stop running.

-:-

He finds her at the Burrow.

It's not hard. She's laughing with Lily by the refreshments table, separate from the crowd of cousins by the porch, and she knows he's watching, waiting for an opportunity, even as he draws giggles out of Rose and Roxanne and banters easily with Louis and Albus. Even here, surrounded by their family, she can feel his presence first and foremost, almost overwhelming her like he had that night.

She gives him his opportunity, perhaps impulsively, and lets him corner her alone in the kitchen, without the protective presence of his sister.

"I'm sorry," he blurts out as soon as they're alone, running his hands through his hair, "I'm sorry I ruined everything."

The problem is, she thinks sadly, he didn't. He'd only accelerated what was bound to happen. It's so much easier to understand this in the clear light of day, without the crush of star-studded black to illuminate the lies. Because when she looks at James, standing helplessly, disarmed, guard down, in his casual blue shirt the same color as his eyes and the jeans she'd last seen discarded on his bedroom floor, something swirls in her heart, and it's not just regret.

"Don't be," she whispers, all the words she'd really meant to say dying in her throat as she looks at him and remembers his touch.

She's a Ravenclaw. She's supposed to question things, think them through, but she doesn't second-guess her decision when she leans forward and presses her lips to his.

"We shouldn't," he murmurs, but he kisses her back anyway.

-:-

When they next meet, he's playing his piano.

Melodic notes fill her world, drowning out the chorus of voices that tell her this is_ wrongwrongwrong_ in her head and transporting her to a time when the only thing that mattered was the sparkle in his eyes and climbing up trees and dancing until they both fell down on dewy-damp grass, bubbling with laughter and watching the skies spin above them, so small and so happy in this big, big world, where happily-ever-after might have been possible.

James turns to look at her, blue eyes glinting, and she remembers it isn't really possible at all.

"How've you been?" he queries softly, reaching her across the room and brushing a loose blond curl of hers back behind her ear, the motion so absent and familiar, so _them_, that it breaks her heart all over again.

Lucy shivers at his touch. "Well," she answers, but her voice cracks in the middle. She refuses to cry, though, because that's not the kind of woman her parents raised – she's eighteen and she's _ready_ to attack the world, except maybe when she looks into his blue eyes.

"I'm glad," he says, watching her carefully, his hand cupping her cheek and his free arm secure around her waist, ready to steady her if she falls.

She won't fall, though. Not again.

"We need to talk," she tells him, steeling herself and locking up those walls around her heart safe and sound so he can't hurt her – so _she_ can't hurt herself.

James nods, as though he's been expecting this, and he probably has, waiting for her to figure things out, trying to figure things out himself. But maybe some things are too complex to really be fully understood, and Lucy thinks the way she feels under his bright gaze is one of those things.

"Let's talk," he says, and she follows him to the piano to _talk_.

Somehow, it doesn't seem like enough.

-:-

"I love you."

It's quite the attention-getter.

"I love you, too," she replies quietly, locking and unlocking her fingers like she does her heart for him. "But James, we're – it's not – _cousins_ – we can't – " Her words come out in a jumble, twisted and tangled up in the lies she tries to believe and the truths that won't stay put, and James smiles slightly, like he knows just what she means.

He probably does. He's been her best friend for years. How could she not have seen this coming?

"Lucy," he says gently, two fingers resting on her chin so he can look her in the eye, ocean blue to ocean blue, desperation into desperation. "Do you love me? Really love me?"

The word _no_ dies in her throat as she looks into his – her – _their_ blue eyes reflected into each other.

"Yes," she chokes out. "I do. Of course I do."

Her voice rings loudly in the silence of his music room, drowning out the pounding of her heart and the thoughts buzzing in her head, drowning out everything except for the fact that he's _here_ and he's touching her and he loves her, and maybe that's all that matters.

"Will you figure this out with me, then?" he asks her, his voice hardly louder than a whisper, echoing in the dampness of the heartbreak room. "Will you stand by my side, Lucy, like you've always done? Or will you run?"

The way he speaks it, there's no dishonor in running, nobody to blame her if she does. But he knows her too well; she will blame herself if she runs from him now, runs from whatever they have and whatever they could have, runs from her life like she might have, had she not been his best friend.

"How can I?" Lucy sighs, and this reply might have been meant for all three of his questions. "There's so much against us."

James grins, then, and he suddenly looks more like the James of her childhood days, the one with a sunny smile to light her world, the one that had disappeared the first time she left him. The one she really, truly loved with all her heart. _This_ is the James she would risk everything for.

"When has that ever stopped us before?" he teases, one hand darting down to poke her in the waist and incite a squeal. "Come on, Lucy. We can do this. Together. We always have."

He takes her hand, presses it against his chest, right over his heart, and she can feel his heartbeat racing, _thump-thump-thump_, to the same beat as hers, waiting for her answer, for her to prove the depths of her love for him, if, indeed, there are any, if she wasn't just lying to him, lying to herself, deluding her heart into thinking she loves this brilliant, handsome, _related_ boy when she really doesn't, really can't.

But she wasn't.

With her free hand, she reaches out and plays three notes on the piano.

They don't mean much. Just a melody they invented as children. To anyone else, they are but notes, just music floating away on the breezes, lost in this big, big world, just like she was.

To him, to her, to _them_, though, they are everything.

_I love you._

Maybe this song can end happily.

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><p><strong>AN: Don't favorite without reviewing, please and thank you.  
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